Everybody wants to be the next Elon Musk (at least in China)
- In Tesla’s Silicon Valley neighbourhood, electric automakers with Chinese owners or backers are setting up shop or recruiting Musk’s former co-workers
- Poaching Tesla talent is getting easier since Musk’s company has grown
Tesla Inc. is now hiring in China, and China Inc. is hiring in Tesla’s backyard.
A groundbreaking in Shanghai attended by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk last week marked what will become the first factory in the nation entirely owned by a foreign automaker.
In Tesla’s Silicon Valley neighbourhood, meanwhile, there are now about a dozen electric automakers with Chinese owners or backers setting up shop or recruiting Musk’s former co-workers. These well-funded start-ups, some of which haven’t sold a single car, are buying up factories, testing prototypes on public roads and kitting out lavish offices in the San Francisco Bay Area. Landing a former Tesla executive has become a top prize.
“Everybody wants to be the next Elon Musk – the Chinese Elon Musk,” said Martin Eberhard, a co-founder of Tesla back when it was called Tesla Motors. He served on the board of Chinese EV maker SF Motors Inc. after it bought his post-Tesla start-up.
The king of touting ex-Tesla hires is Faraday Future, a start-up founded by former Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting that began work last year in a refurbished tire factory in Hanford, California, which is about 200 miles from Tesla’s Fremont plant. A search of LinkedIn shows more than 70 Faraday employees listing Tesla as past work experience – though not all of them remain after recent departures – and Faraday often boasts of “top talent” hires like Jeff Risher, the former head of Tesla’s intellectual property and litigation.